Culling a Century of Stories

Authors featured in the first volume of “The Best American Short Stories,” covering the year 1915, included Newbold Noyes, Elsie Singmaster and Katharine Metcalf Roof. The just-released “100 Years of the Best American Short Stories” includes some slightly more familiar names, like Hemingway, Cheever and Munro.

Over the century, the series has published more than 2,000 stories. In an email interview, Heidi Pitlor, who has edited the annual anthologies since the 2007 volume, described the process of whittling that number down to 41 stories as “rather torturous.” She undertook the task with the guest editor Lorrie Moore, who also wrote the book’s introduction. The long view offered them a chance to see changes in how we tell stories.

“Until recently,” Pitlor said, “not many authors were writing about a war until about a generation after it happened. Now, perhaps with the rise of the Internet and the change in the nature of warfare itself, that distillation period has shrunk.” She also noted the impact of changes in transportation. Whereas a century ago, “so many stories featured sea captains regaling younger seamen with tall tales,” the advent of less risky modes of travel led to “more stories of the individual and the internal life.”

Moore said that representing historical eras was not high among her criteria for choosing. “The stories in the series already reflect their time — literary art by definition almost always does that,” she said. “So we were selecting on the basis of love.” That love was limited only by a decision to avoid any overlap with “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” edited by John Updike and published in 2000.

One notable omission in the new book is of any story by Moore herself, widely considered one of the best living practitioners of the form. Did she consciously leave herself out? “Well it wasn’t unconscious. It’s not like it slipped my mind,” she said. “When we had to leave so many other stories out, why would I include anything by me? That was an easy decision to make.”

Quotable

“Money is much dirtier than sex ever was. That’s why I write about it. . . . I’m proud that I’ve never stopped writing about being poor.” — Eileen Myles, in an interview with The New Republic

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